Re: Forwarded from Anthony (on fascism)

["Workers World, Chicago Bureau" <wwchi@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

-----Original Message-----
From: Xxxx Xxxxx Xxxxxx <xxxxxxxx@xxxxxxxxxxx>


>
>1) Although I know Marx's definition, can somebody explain to me
>the meaning of
>_petty bourgeoisie
>
>a) in the context of periphery/semi-periphery of the world
>system? (for example,
>the Kemalist cadre, the bonapartist
>founders of the nationalist/bourgeois regime
>in Turkey, was composed of military officers,
>not petty bourgeois intellectuals
>in the strict technical sense of the term. They never drew the majority of
their
>members from the working class, but from upper middle bourgeoisie)


There seems to be some confusion here.  You are writing as if "petty
bourgeois intellectual" were a fundamental term - that is, as if the "petty
bourgeoisie" were usually "intellectuals".  No, the petty bourgeoisie are
(fundamentally) exactly that: small businesspeople (with farms, shops,
etc.).  On the one hand, they have little real power in society and are
oppressed and driven out of business by the big bourgeoisie.  On the other
hand, their "social being" as far as their livelihoods is concerned is tied
to the market; they dream of becoming large bourgeois; they exploit labor
when possible, although they don't have the capital to exploit very many
laborers.  So they are pulled in two directions whenever there is struggle
between the workers and the bourgeoisie: each tries to recruit them in the
struggle against the other.  The workers try to convince them that the big
bourgeoisie are going to destroy them in any case, and that rationally their
future lies with the workers' revolution.  The bourgeoisie appeals to them
as "fellow bourgeois" and asks for their help in crushing the workers'
movement.

Now, the term "petty-bourgeois" is now commonly used (by extension) to refer
to some OTHER strata which don't fit neatly into the categories of
"bourgeoisie" and "proletariat".  Such as intellectuals, supervisors in
enterprises, government bureaucrats, doctors, lawyers, and so on.  Erik Olin
Wright, a Marxist academic, did some interesting theoretical work on this
general topic.  However, this doesn't mean that college professors are
identical to small shopkeepers in their behavior.  But intellectuals do have
a tendency to think of themselves as individualists against the mob, and
depend for their reputation and fortunes on the bourgeoisie.  So there are
similarities.

Now, when you try to apply these categories to situations other than fully
developed capitalist countries with a mature class structure, I think you
are undoubtedly going to run into problems if you don't make adjustments.
Take Turkey as an example.  I personally know very very little about the
political economy of Turkey at the time of the Kemalist movement, and
probably you can instruct me about it. But my impression is that there was
nothing like a developed industrial bourgeoisie in the country, even less so
than in Russia at the time.  Therefore I would expect that the proletariat
would have been numerically small as well.  Certainly I would NEVER think of
comparing Kemal with a fascist movement; I would think that Kemal was more
similar to Garibaldi, say, that is, someone carrying out a unifying
bourgeois revolution that would make capitalist development possible - as
opposed to someone trying to defend existing capitalism against the
proletariat.  Therefore your statement that Kemal was supported by the
"upper middle bourgeois" is exactly what I would expect.

Also, is it correct to call Kemal a "bonapartist"?  It depends on how much
of a workers' movement there was in Turkey at the time.  A "bonapartist" is
one who gets support from both the organized workers and the bourgeoisie and
represents an uneasy class truce between them.  Usually I would expect to
find bonapartist leaders at a time when the class structure and class
struggle in bourgeois society has matured to a much greater extent than in
Turkey at the time of Kemal.

And similar problems are going to arise when you try to carry over the
concept of 'fascism' into countries under imperialist oppression.

>b) in the context of Europe (wasn't the core class
>composition of German fascism
>upper middle class (big business)?)


More confusion: why do you equate "upper middle class" with big business?
Why not say "upper class"?


This is the problem with the whole idea of "layer-cake" classes
(upper-middle, lower-middle, lower-upper etc etc etc).  This whole notion of
class differences as if they were just "higher" or "lower" is a deliberate
attempt by US sociologists of the 1950's to undercut and destroy Marxist
analysis.  In the mainstream US sociological class structure, class is
determined by income.  There is a big middle class, which you can subdivide
as many times as you want, then there is an upper class and a lower class.
The lower class is maybe the 25% of society with the lowest income.  The
first idea is to avoid ever talking about the "working class".  Most of the
workers are told that they are "middle class" and have nothing in common
with the "lower class".

In Marxist class analysis, we look first at the wealth that people have, and
at the source and nature of that wealth.  Are you one of the rather low
percentage of the population whose fortune consists of a substantial
interest in productive property (banks, factories, hotels)?  Then you're in
the bourgeoisie.  Are you one of that very high percentage of the population
who do NOT have such wealth, and whose income is from their labor for wage
or salary, and who is providing their employing and exploiting firms with
profit?  Then you're part of the proletariat.  Then there are those middle
strata.  Sometimes we slip up and say that the "petty bourgeoisie" is the
"middle class", but that is a mistake in the current climate, because most
of the people who are called "middle class" in common speech are simply
workers, for us.

Anyway: of course fascism SERVED big business and was supported by big
business.  The whole point of fascism, however, is that it is a mass
movement.  Most simply, it is thugs who go out and beat up and kill
Communists, break strikes, smash in the windows of stores and houses, bust
up public meetings of the left, conduct racist murders and atrocities, and
attend the Nazi meetings (or, in the U.S. south in the 1950's and 1960's,
White Citizens' Council meetings).  These people who are getting their hands
dirty and bloody are not the big businesspeople themselves.  They have to
find and recruit people, so who are they going to turn to and how are they
going to do it?  That's the substance of the discussion.


>What is my class position, for example, when I chat on line with Marxist
>revolutionaries, discuss women's liberation with
>Turkish leftists, and write my
>doctoral proposal in the mean time? Am I a petty bourgeois? It seems I am a
>_middle class_ par excellence, not a "petty"


Actually, there is a tradition in Marxism of talking about students as
"declassed" elements.  That means, I guess, that youth are flexible and
haven't yet created enduring bonds with one class or another.  Although this
is a variable, it would seem to me.  I have met very working-class students
and very bourgeois students.  This is a funny story:  around the time of the
Gulf war, I was on the elevator in a local university, and a right-wing
student started harassing me about my leaflets, and I turned to him and
said, "Do you happen to have a lot of stock in a major oil company or
weapons manufacturer?"  This was INTENDED to be a rhetorical question:  he
would say "no" and I would say "Then this war is not in your interest."  But
instead he stared at me, turned pale, and didn't say a word, and I realized,
by God, he DID!!!

However, I think it's worth mentioning that while the behavior of classes is
largely determined, the behavior of individuals with a given class
background is much less determined.  Class analysis is about classes, not
mainly about individuals, sort of in the way weather maps are about air
masses, not air molecules.  (See Plekhanov, "The Role of the Individual in
History," for a fuller discussion.)  So there is a certain amount of freedom
for individuals to attach themselves to one class camp or another.  Are you
tying yourself to movements for the workers and oppressed?  Or are you tying
yourself to the big bourgeoisie?  Or are you trying to stake out an
intermediate, "free", "unfettered", "independent" ground for yourself in the
middle?  :-)

In the struggle,

Lou Paulsen
Chicago